What's new in Kentico CMS 3.1

We are happy to announce the release of Kentico CMS 3.1. The new version brings some major improvements:

The E-commerce module now supports product options.

New, customizable E-commerce Starter Site.

New, more detailed E-commerce Guide.

Incremental Updates - you can export changes made on the development machine since a specific date and import them on the live server.

Object Staging - the Content Staging module allows you to synchronize changes made to page templates, document types, transformations and other objects from the development server to the live server by a few clicks.

The new Private Messaging module allows site members to send messages to other members - this feature is useful for community sites.

Full support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (Visual Studio 2008 has been supported since version 3.0).

Save Up to 36 % on Microsoft SQL Server Licenses

We have joined the Microsoft ISV Royalty Program which allows us to sell Microsoft SQL Server OEM licenses with Kentico CMS. You can save up to 36 % by purchasing SQL Server with Kentico CMS. The OEM license can be used only for Kentico CMS (you cannot use it for any other application).

Kentico Support Team Growing

Since July 2008, we will have 10 support engineers ready to answer your Kentico CMS questions. We are also planning to enhance the support hours once the new team members are trained. In these days, our average response time is around 4 hours and we work hard to make it even shorter.

Kentico CMS and Shared Hosting

As Kentico CMS grows, it consists of more and more files and DLL libraries. It has an impact on the memory requirements of the web application. We realize that the shared hosting support is important for our clients and we are trying to optimize the memory usage, but this process may take some time.

The current version of Kentico CMS requires around 125 MB of memory to run without frequent restarts. If you use shared hosting, please be sure to check if your hosting plan provides enough memory.

We have successfully tested Kentico CMS 3.1 with following hosting partners:

Applied Innovations - you need to use at least the VS-1 hosting plan that comes with 175 MB of memory.

DiscountASP.NET - you need to use the new Windows 2008 hosting that comes with a higher memory limit than their Windows 2003 hosting. Also, you need to use Kentico CMS 3.1. If you already host your site with DiscountASP.NET, please upgrade to version 3.1 and ask their technical support for moving your site to a Windows 2008 machine.

End of Kentico CMS 1.x Support

We will end the technical support for Kentico CMS 1.x versions on September 1, 2008. If you're still using version 1.x, please be sure to upgrade to the latest version. You can use the migration toolkit to upgrade version 1.9 directly to version 3.0.

Kentico CMS Source Code License Price Increase

We will be increasing the price of Kentico CMS 1 Server License with Source Code from $6,999 to $9,999 starting from September 1, 2008. If you're considering a purchase of the full source code, please contact our sales at sales@kentico.com to arrange the purchase, before the price goes up. We do not plan to change the price of any other licenses.

Next Version Roadmap

The next version is now scheduled for September 2008. Beside continuous improvements of existing features, this version will be focused on the following areas:

Social Networking module that will allow you to build community sites with on-line groups communicating through blogs, forums, message boards, galleries, private messaging, etc. It will allow you to build on-line communities in the way you know from Facebook.

Improved file and image management that will allow you to insert images into text in a more comfortable way and work with very large files, such as movies.

First .NET User Groups Running on Kentico CMS

In the last issue of Kentico Newsletter, we informed you that we offer a free web site solution for .NET user groups based on Kentico CMS and hosted by Applied Innovations who provides a free hosting for .NET user groups. We have received many registrations and we are happy to show some of the new web sites running on Kentico CMS: